Jenks sputtered at the black flame, but Ivy stopped his budding harangue with a hissed comment I didn’t quite catch.

“What if I learn how to jump the lines?” I said, searching for the first hints of a plan. “If I could get in undetected, that would be half the battle. Maybe more. Simple snag and drag.” It wasn’t, but I could build on the idea.

Ceri took the end of her pencil and crushed even the ash to dust. “Learn how to trip the lines before sunrise? No. I’m sorry, Rachel. It takes decades.”

Ivy leaned past her cracked monitor. “Why sunrise?”

The pretty elf ’s shoulders drooped. “That’s when the lines will close to summoning travel and they will make a decision. Right now, Trent’s probably still in holding, but as soon as they’re sure no one will be pulled out of negotiations, he will be sold.”

Sold. It was an ugly word, and I felt my face twist. Seeing it, Ceri shrugged. “Anything you want to do, you need to do before someone buys him, or you will be dealing with a specific demon, not a committee. Committees are difficult, but a single demon is tenacious where a committee will only want to make sure they all get something.”

This was wrong. Really wrong, and I sighed when Jenks swore at Ivy, dramatically crossed his chest as if making a promise, then flew to my cracker bowl.

“Trent doesn’t have a great deal of value as a familiar,” Ceri was saying, her eyes down in what looked like embarrassment, “but it’s not often that a potential familiar stumbles into the ever-after without a preexisting claim by another demon. There are a lot of demons who will pay, not caring that there will be a long downtime to bring him up to usefulness. That’s what Al does to make his bread and butter.”

I hesitated, thinking it might explain why Al was so hot for Nick and then me. “He trains familiars?” I asked, and Ceri shook her head. She had begun to doodle again, and I stared at the pair of tortured eyes taking form on the yellow paper, trapped behind lines of blue.

“In a manner of speaking,” she said softly. “He finds suitable candidates, instructs them enough to make them profitable, then tricks them into the ever-after to be sold for his gain. Al is good at it, and he’s made an exceptional life selling people to those unwilling to cross the lines to get their own.”

Jenks’s wings clattered and Ivy clicked her computer off, not bothering to pretend to be working anymore. “He’s a slave dealer?” she asked, and Ceri drew a slumped figure of a man at the base of a tombstone.